Good article, but you're not taking the problem seriously enough.
I'm very much in the "hard intellectual work is its own reward" camp, but you're missing the thing that makes this problematic. I've been in postgraduate computer science courses - packed full of international students - where the lecturer openly identified ~50% of the course as having provably cheated on the first assignment, and was forbidden by the Uni admin from engaging in disciplinary action. What do you reckon happened on the second assignment?
Coupled with economic inequality, it's even worse. Assuming Mummy and Daddy aren't bankrolling your study experience, and you need to take a shitty student job -- why waste your time being the guy who does his 20 hours a week and comes home to pull all-nighters when you could be doing 35 hours a week plus twenty minutes of prompt composition and that's your studies handled?
It's pernicious, it's bad for truth and knowledge and thought, and it's a systemic wrecker of both decency and competence.
I'm not defending that, and that does sound miserable - sorry. But I think it's down to the university to set guidance in place and stick to it, which I don't think is impossible.
But I'm a firm believer that karma will come - that at some stage there will be a closed book exam or a job assessment where these tools can't be used, and at that point the people who have followed the rules and learned the material properly will be rewarded. Of course it may not happen for 100% of cases, but I'd like to think that even for the others there'll be a healthy dose of imposter syndrome hanging over them.
I might be a bit more positive about AI - I use it as some kind of a PA who can draft, organise, suggest and refine. And it does it fairly well - and in contrast to Grok, ChatGPT really learns and gets to know your style.
People will continue to learn by themselves, but they might focus more on what really interests them - and the risk might be that they skip fundamentals (which are always boring) and then struggle with the more advanced things. I assume it's up to us to find ways to deal with it.
What students apparently do is to get AI to create revision plans and suggest resources - which sounds like a sensible use, although I'm not always sure it makes the best suggestions ...
I agree with most of that. But having seen referees' reports with hallucinated references in, it's clear that even for academics there's a temptation to use the tools in ways that they shouldn't
I do use them quite a lot for file-only forms - and no-one seems to notice ...
There seems to be a school-of-thought among some academics that believe that texts need to be long and incomprehensible to be good (it's more common in German, but I've seen it here as well). AI will be perfect for those people as it can easily inflate a simple sentence into a 10-page email.
This is one of your best but who’s keeping tabs? It was so beautifully written , calming and reassuring and really lovely. Thank you for giving me a pleasurable few minutes reading it.
Good article, but you're not taking the problem seriously enough.
I'm very much in the "hard intellectual work is its own reward" camp, but you're missing the thing that makes this problematic. I've been in postgraduate computer science courses - packed full of international students - where the lecturer openly identified ~50% of the course as having provably cheated on the first assignment, and was forbidden by the Uni admin from engaging in disciplinary action. What do you reckon happened on the second assignment?
Coupled with economic inequality, it's even worse. Assuming Mummy and Daddy aren't bankrolling your study experience, and you need to take a shitty student job -- why waste your time being the guy who does his 20 hours a week and comes home to pull all-nighters when you could be doing 35 hours a week plus twenty minutes of prompt composition and that's your studies handled?
It's pernicious, it's bad for truth and knowledge and thought, and it's a systemic wrecker of both decency and competence.
I'm not defending that, and that does sound miserable - sorry. But I think it's down to the university to set guidance in place and stick to it, which I don't think is impossible.
But I'm a firm believer that karma will come - that at some stage there will be a closed book exam or a job assessment where these tools can't be used, and at that point the people who have followed the rules and learned the material properly will be rewarded. Of course it may not happen for 100% of cases, but I'd like to think that even for the others there'll be a healthy dose of imposter syndrome hanging over them.
I might be a bit more positive about AI - I use it as some kind of a PA who can draft, organise, suggest and refine. And it does it fairly well - and in contrast to Grok, ChatGPT really learns and gets to know your style.
People will continue to learn by themselves, but they might focus more on what really interests them - and the risk might be that they skip fundamentals (which are always boring) and then struggle with the more advanced things. I assume it's up to us to find ways to deal with it.
What students apparently do is to get AI to create revision plans and suggest resources - which sounds like a sensible use, although I'm not always sure it makes the best suggestions ...
I agree with most of that. But having seen referees' reports with hallucinated references in, it's clear that even for academics there's a temptation to use the tools in ways that they shouldn't
I do use them quite a lot for file-only forms - and no-one seems to notice ...
There seems to be a school-of-thought among some academics that believe that texts need to be long and incomprehensible to be good (it's more common in German, but I've seen it here as well). AI will be perfect for those people as it can easily inflate a simple sentence into a 10-page email.
This is one of your best but who’s keeping tabs? It was so beautifully written , calming and reassuring and really lovely. Thank you for giving me a pleasurable few minutes reading it.
Enjoy the weekend.
Thanks, I appreciate it
Spot on and thought provoking....although it was rather smoothly written :-)